The Jews, though scattered and persecuted, are not destroyed; they are preserved monuments of the divine veracity. O, may we take warning from their awful fate! "Because of unbelief _they_ were broken off, and _we_ stand by faith." "Let us not be highminded, but fear; for if God spared not the natural branches, take heed, lest he spare not us. Behold, therefore, the goodness and severity of God; on them which fell, severity; but, towards us, goodness, if we continue in his goodness: otherwise, we also shall be cut off." It will avail us little to confess Jesus as the Messiah, if we are unconcerned to know and practise the doctrines he has taught. But may we "serve the Lord with fear, and rejoice with trembling." "Kiss the Son, lest he be angry, and ye perish from the way, when his wrath is kindled but a little." "Blessed are all they that put their trust in him," for his word is fate; immutability seals, and eternity executes, whatever he decrees. CHAPTER LXX. And he said, It is a light thing that thou shouldest be my servant to raise up the tribes of Jacob, and to restore the preserved of Israel: I will also give thee for a light to the Gentiles, that thou mayest be my salvation unto the end of the earth.--Isaiah xlix. 6. The descendants of Abraham, the friend of God, were treated as the Lord's peculiar people; singled out from other nations as the favourites of heaven, the Lord was their lawgiver and king. No other nation had God "so nigh unto them in all things that they called upon him for," as the people of Israel. To benefit them, the laws of nature were reversed, and nations destroyed. They were employed by Jehovah to punish the idolatrous people for their crimes.[142] They were selected to maintain the knowledge and worship of the true God,[143] and to convey his pure and holy law to remote generations. Thus favoured and blessed, the Jews were accustomed contemptuously to regard all other nations, as common and unclean; they could not endure to have one stone thrown down of the partition wall, which had so long separated them from the Gentiles.[144] They proudly enough appropriated to themselves all the blessings connected with the appearance of the Messiah. But it would be a light thing that Christ should become Jehovah's servant, endure pain and scorn, merely to "raise up the tribes of Jacob, and to restore the preserved of Israel;" that nation which he knew would so long despise and reject him. But Messiah was given for "a light to the Gentiles," and Jehovah's "salvation unto the ends of the earth." He has asked, and received "the heathen for his inheritance, and the uttermost parts of the earth for his possession." "Yea, all nations shall be blessed in him;" for the root of Jesse shall stand for "an ensign of the people, and to him shall the Gentiles seek:" to his glorious rest shall all nations flow. He shall have "dominion from sea to sea, and from the river unto the ends of the earth." "They